When it comes to company culture, our mission at The Workloop is a workforce that is 100% happy, driven and engaged as we believe this is the way to get the best results for our clients. In order to build this foundation we set up six key points that feed our mantra of being employee obsessed.
1. Empower Agents – We set up an internal structure that gives agents a voice at Workloop. Agents have direct access to any level manager and are represented at board level.
2. Show Agents Respect – We offer time off, benefits, and build working environments that reflect how important our staff are to Workloop.
3. Invest in People – We invest in our staff from the beginning. From the recruitment and training, through to ongoing technical and emotional training, we continually reassess the work environment to ensure our agents are 100% comfortable.
4. Support Managers Who Care – We have made sure our managers are trained to understand why developing a relationship with each member of his or her staff is important from a commercial and emotional point of view.
5. Make the Work More Exciting – AI and robotics solutions help us automate basic customer experience and monotonous back-office tasks that once drained the excitement out of work for agents. This means tasks for our live agents gets more complex and interesting. This complexity combined with our internal rotation scheme means that agents feel refreshed, more engaged on new campaigns, and avoid burn out from doing repetitive tasks.
6. Understand What Drives People – We try to understand what drives all our employees and work with them to achieve their goals. We do this if their goals are to move into management, marketing, finance or another part of Workloop but also if their dreams are outside of our business.
Why did we set up the Workloop culture the way we did?
If you ask anyone who works in and around outsourcing what the biggest issues the industry faces, they will probably tell you about the constant rehiring cycles. It’s no secret that employee engagement amongst agent-level staff in the BPO world is incredibly LOW and staff turnover incredibly HIGH. The average industry employee turnover is 80% per year!! This points directly to one thing: agents generally don’t want to be there.
Even with the best tech, amazing processes, and strong price point, if your staff are disengaged it all seems to count for nothing. It’s definitely a challenge to make a fantastic business for customers with such an unhappy workforce.
So, what exactly are typical agents so unhappy about?
Before establishing Workloop, we knew that if we were going to really offer a great solution for our clients, we would first have to address the root cause of this unhappiness. That’s why we spent many months speaking with agents and their managers to dig down and find out what the main gripes in the industry are. We came back from braving those unhappy agent fields with the following responses:
• Typical agents do not feel empowered or listened to.
• Most agents feeling commoditized or not respected.
• Agents are not generally offered career progression or goals.
• Agents deal with poor managers or poor relationships with their managers.
• Agents receive poor training.
• The work is just so repetitive!
Now, do you see why we put so much emphasis on company culture, employee engagement, and a great work environment at Workloop?
Employee obsession works in outsourcing because it produces engaged, happy staff that become strong brand ambassadors and stay with the company for a longer time. Will being employee obsessed guarantee success in the BPO world? No. However, not being so will no doubt put a limit on how good you can make the experience not only for your staff, but for your clients and their customers. Isn’t customer experience what the BPO industry is all about? While some may say that investing in employee obsession will compromise shareholders or the company’s price point, a truly employee-obsessed company in the long term lowers prices and increases profit margin.
We all win!!